Independent radio producers were amused recently to hear from BBC management that Radio 3 would welcome "sexy" programme proposals for its Between The Ears slot. Libido isn't a big priority in the world of radio, and Radio 3 seems more acquainted with the cold lino than most. There's a reason. Between The Ears (weekdays, 10.45pm, R3), which is celebrating its 20th birthday this year, is, after all, broadcast just as the listeners are going to bed. To mark that anniversary, it's commissioned a game of consequences in which radio producers from all over the world use differing techniques to fill in the blanks adjacent to the traditional boxes.

It begins with The Woman, Australian Natalie Kestecher's funny and saucy account of her attempts to find a man who measures up to the ideal she's had in mind since seeing the film Montenegro, which is basically "a monobrowed Balkan lover who's naked under his overalls and knows how to barbecue meat". You would have to ride many days before finding a British radio producer prepared to offer that much about themselves, let alone allow us to hear their mother or male best friend offering advice on how they should go about finding a companion. But since the series promises everything "from documentary to drama, from sound art to fantastical storytelling", it's not clear how much of this is real and how much is Memorex; this is even more the case with further episodes, one of which is about a man who wishes to cut himself off from sound by living in a box. It's all rich, and a refreshingly loose, non-linear accompaniment to climbing into the winceyette jammies. Regular readers will know that Radio 3 does good speech. What they may not know is how hip some of it is.

The recording of the interview with the Clash that takes up Cerys On 6 (Sunday, 10am, 6Music) was one of the least punk rock occasions I have ever attended. Hundreds of Clash fans, many well advanced into their mortgage years, sat in serried ranks in the big studio at Maida Vale and gawped at Mick Jones, Topper Headon, Paul Simonon and tour manager Johnny Green as if they were historical monuments come to life. It looked and felt like a school assembly being addressed by last year's sixth form leavers. Thankfully, the members of the band, and Mick Jones in particular, were in most genial form and didn't actually require interviewing, shrugging off the fans' tongue-tied reverence and instead talking about the practicalities of music, which are always the most interesting things. Jones, for instance, said he was informed by a vocal coach that the reason John Lennon held his guitar so high up was to enable him to sing from the diaphragm, which I'd never heard before.

A new series on any aspect of terror will inevitably be timely. Fergal Keane's absorbing whistle-stop tour of its history, Terror Through Time (weekdays, 1.45pm, R4), starts with Napoleon and the birth of terror and progresses, if that's the word, through the 19th-century nihilists to the Baader-Meinhof gang and the present day.

Sound of the week is made by hundreds of penned-in Sunderland supporters, chanting as they wait in Newcastle railway station for the police to escort them up to St James' Park. It's one of the highlights of The Station (Wednesday, 11am, R4), which is sound recordist Chris Watson's one-day audio diary of England's most charismatic rail terminal.